ABSTRACT
Since the late 1800s, engineering industries (construction, ship-and railbased transportation, electrical engineering, and many others) have developed a legacy of design for manufacturability (DfM) guidelines and methods, further referred to as mechanical engineering (ME)/assembly DfM. They became known as the rule of 10, the rule of 80/20, concurrent engineering, correct by construction (CBC), Pareto distributions, and so on [1]. Many of them were recognized by the semiconductor industry in more or less conscious ways. This chapter discusses why and how integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing should take better advantage of them, based on examples related to improving the quality of IC product design. Because DfM does not generate new product functionality, its main value is cost reduction, reflected in three phases (Table 2.1):
• Initial: minimizing the cost impact of product flow setup • In production: reducing the cost of manufacturing • In the field: avoiding the cost of reliability
The relative importance of each of these phases is different from the designer and the customer points of view. For the designer, the most important is the initial phase. The direct cost of product flow or project setup is usually low, but it has a significant impact on product viability. Cost expectation for advanced technologies is split in an 80/20 ratio between the cost commitment and the execution phases of product life (Figure 2.1).
